Record Numbers For Game Industry in 2006

With a certain portable system from Nintendo breaking hardware and software records, you just knew there was going to be good news overall for the game industry come the end of the fiscal year. Sure enough, 2006 was a record year, according to Japan's Computer Entertainment Suppliers Association (CESA).

Mainichi.com and Asahi.com, relaying an announcement from the firm, report that worldwide game industry related shipments totaled 1,632,300,000,000 yen (approximately $14.2 billion) for the year. This is the highest figure since CESA started providing reports in 1996. The previous record was in 2001, where a hot PS2 pushed shipments to 1,457,400,000,000 yen.

This figure breaks down to 958.1 billion yen for hardware and 674.2 billion yen for software. Both of these figures are also new records. Software sales had previously peaked in 2000 at 570 billion yen. Hardware had previously peaked in 2001 at 930 billion yen.